Whilst they are in pre-school, the goddess Athena urges them to buy The Iliad their schoolteacher gives them a copy of José Lezama Lima’s banned homoerotic novel Paradiso and their father’s Russian girlfriend introduces them to Tolstoy. Raúl’s short life is brightened by literature. In return, Cassandra reveals the boxer will win a silver medal but conceals that, shortly afterwards, he will die. The boxer’s analysis is spectacularly inaccurate.

‘No one knows me and I can say I am Cassandra.’ At the club, our narrator attracts the attention of an Olympic boxer, who suggests exchanging palm readings. ‘I feel comfortable when I dress like this,’ they say.

If they are discovered, they will be sent to jail. On their last night in Cienfuegos, they go to a dance club, passing as a woman. On an island that exported the macho image of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, Raúl is a rebel – an embodiment of a vilified counterculture. ‘I hate you,’ the captain says, ‘because you look like her, but you’re not her.’ Other interlocutors call our narrator ‘Rauli’ and ‘Raulito’, or impose nicknames based on Raúl’s distinctive appearance – ‘Olivia Newton-John’, ‘Marilyn Monroe’, and ‘Wendy’ (from Peter Pan ). The captain, who sexually abuses them, calls them ‘Katerina’ – the name of his faraway wife. Later, she will reimagine Raúl as a man almost six foot five inches tall. Their mother, who dresses them in her late sister’s clothes, wants Raúl to reincarnate Aunt Nancy. Instead, almost every character foists an identity on Raúl. Like the Trojan oracle, they are consistently ignored. ‘I want to be Cassandra’, they tell us at the start of the novel. Too short, too blond, too blue-eyed, and ‘too feminine’ for a model Cuban, wherever Raúl goes, they stand out. Their (or perhaps his or her) narration flits easily between their early adulthood in the military camp overseas and their bookish childhood at home. Gala tells the story from Raúl’s first-person perspective, an approach that lends intimacy whilst leaving the reader unsure how the protagonist identifies. As the reader soon learns, Raúl will die there at the hands of a captain. After turning eighteen, Raúl is sent, unwillingly, to join the Cuban brigades fighting apartheid forces in Angola. In 1970s and 80s Cienfuegos, a port city in southern Cuba, Cassandra is a clairvoyant and bibliophilic trans person, born Raúl Iriarte.

It’s a title that indicates the layers of literary allusion that characterise this short and ambitious coming-of-age novel of identity and fate. With these words, the Cuban writer Marcial Gala evokes the ignored oracle of Troy and the opening line of Moby-Dick.

Call Me Cassandra by Marcial Gala